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Operator Overloaded

I’ve starting hitting walls with Kendo UI not supporting some expected functionality. The Angular UI
Slider makes it easy change the configuration options at run time and thereby change the min and max settings. I’m
hugely disappointed that there isn’t a way to do this seamlessly with the Kendo UI slider. I was hoping this was a case
of me needing to RTFM but my forum post
confirmed that I can’t “refresh” the slider.

The current recommended hack is to call the destroy function, remove it from the DOM, and then recreate the slider.
That isn’t slick but I have a job to do so here we go:

I started the ReactJS-OC meetup group this month and we just had our first gathering.
I presented on the fundamental concepts of ReactJS and how to get started. There were technical difficulties but
we managed with some humor. Humongous thanks to PeopleSpace and Codazen
for sponsoring with a venue and food, respectively.

I quit my cushy engineering job a month and half ago to be an independent developer. It wasn’t an overnight decision and
a lot of thought and ramp up went into it. My long game is to bootstrap a recurring revenue product but for now this is
what pays the bills. I’ll detail that path in another post but this one is about being a hired gun.

If you are looking for inspiration then I’ve got a list of freelancing resources for you.

Reading

If you’re already using Kendo UI in your AngularJS project then I don’t need to sing praises for how easy Telerik
made integration. They’ve made the developer experience simple and I’m happy to for the Pro version. I’ve recently
become an independent consultant and it’s amazing what I will pay for to get my work done better and faster. That’s
another post for another day, though.;

Using any of the Kendo UI widgets is as simple as using a directive.

<inputkendo-date-pickername="dob"id="dobPicker"/>

In real life though you often want to call on the widget APIs to programmatically do something. If you were in a plain
ole’ jQuery app you could open the above date picker like so

$('#dobPicker').data('kendoDatePicker').open();

But how do you do this in AngularJS without using jQuery? In one of my applications I use an accordion but the specs
changed to say the first two sections have to always expand on page load. I needed a way to access the Panel Bar’s APIs
to do this.

Of course I don’t want to rely on using $('#accountFormAccordion').data('kendoPanelBar') because this is an Angular
application. Instead I created a directive that can be reused with the kendo-panel-bar directive.

You can access your Kendo widget inside your Angular directives and controllers by giving it name when you declare your
Kendo widget in your template. In my example I name it ‘accountAccordion’ and Kendo puts it on the scope for me to use.